


one jump ahead (of the horrifyingly homicidal hunters)

by ceruleancats



Series: oops! all avatars [2]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Murder, Comedy, Gen, Humor, Hunt!Basira, Hunt!Daisy, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Web!Martin, basira and daisy trying to track them down and failing epically, jon and martin being gay fugitives, of "people" who generally deserve it, this is a sequel to be clear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25120537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceruleancats/pseuds/ceruleancats
Summary: Some seriously weird shit has gone down at the Magnus Institute, and the police have put their best, most ruthless pair of detectives on the case. Basira just wants catch the idiots responsible (and possibly kill them, you know, if she and Daisy are feeling it) so she can go the fuck home, but unfortunately that's much, much easier said than done.
Relationships: Basira Hussain & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Series: oops! all avatars [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1818265
Comments: 41
Kudos: 128





	1. the basement

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: this is a sequel to/set in the same universe as "what's an evil fear god to a non-believer?" and it will definitely make a hell of a lot more sense if you go read that one first. It's a good fic, I promise! You won't regret it!
> 
> Okay, if you're still here and you really don't want to go read it, I'll give you a tl;dr below (spoilers for "non-believer," obviously). Also you can definitely still read this summary if you read "non-believer" back when it was coming out, since to be fair that was a couple months ago.
> 
> [TL;DR: Basically, the previous fic is a s1 AU in which all of the people in the Archives are avatars (Web!Martin, Spiral!Sasha, Desolation!Tim, and as you find out near the end, Slaughter!Jon). Martin's assignment from the Web is to get rid of the Archivist, either by killing him or just getting him to quit and join the Web, but this is easier said than done. Jon spends most of the fic hardcore pretending not to believe any of the statements and ignoring everything supernatural that goes on in the Archives (which is a fair amount of things, because all of his assistants are avatars). Eventually Jane Prentiss attacks, and Jon and Martin have their whole panic room confession scene, except in this case it's Jon revealing he's been an avatar of the Slaughter the whole time and has known that Martin is a Web avatar. Elias comes and tries to brutally pipe murder Martin because they hate each other, but Jon kills him with a gun he's been carrying around the whole fic and it sticks because of his Slaughter powers. Then they meet up with Tim and Sasha, Tim kills Prentiss with his Desolation powers, which leaves the Archives covered in dead worms, and Jon asks Martin to run away and become a fugitive with him and also have dinner. Martin, predictably, says yes, because he's been pining over Jon for nearly the entire fic, and that's basically where we end.]
> 
> Anyway, I hope you guys enjoy this first chapter, with a different POV on my wacky little AU!
> 
> (Also sorry if you got a double email for this -- I posted it and fucked it up and then had to repost lmao)

The carpet floor of the cramped basement of the Magnus Institute, apparently more generously referred to as the Archives by its staff (judging by the scratched and partially melted gold plaque on the door leading in), was absolutely blanketed in a countless number of fat, white, rotting, very dead worms. 

“This has got to be some sort of biohazard,” Basira said under her breath to Daisy, valiantly resisting the urge to puke at the disgusting smell wafting up from the thousands, possibly millions of rotting worm corpses. 

“Hm,” said Daisy from beside her, seemingly unaffected for some cosmically unfair reason. “Good to see the scene undisturbed.” She lifted up a piece of the police tape that was criss-crossed rather crazily across the inside of the doorframe and ducked carefully under it into the minefield of worms. 

“Yeah, but they could have given us gas masks, or something,” Basira complained, trailing after Daisy into the room and stepping between the worms as best she could. She managed exactly one safe step forward, and then immediately afterwards exploded several worm corpses squishily under the heel of her left boot. Basira resisted the urge to groan. Great, this was just great. She was going to have such a fun, glamorous time tonight cleaning rotting worm insides off the soles of her shoes. 

Daisy ignored her and stalked forward, crouching down to inspect a particularly large mound of worm corpses. She leaned in close to sniff them, which Basira almost physically cringed at, and then turned around to address Basira. “These aren’t normal worms.”

“No shit,” Basira said. “I don’t think normal worms show up the thousands and then all die at once like some kind of suicide cult.”

“Fair enough,” said Daisy, shrugging and standing up. She crossed the room, still somehow avoiding smashing any worm corpses. “Come this way, let’s see the room where the guy was killed.”

Basira sighed deeply (internally—sighing aloud was admitting weakness) and made her way over, smashing many worm corpses despite her best efforts. At this point, the smell was seriously making her light-headed. “Fuckers,” she hissed quietly at the corpses. The corpses did not respond, which was honestly probably for the best. 

The door to the filing room where the guy (or more specifically, Elias something or rather, the Head of the Institute) was killed had yet more police tape blocking the entrance, enough to totally obscure the contents of the room. Someone had evidently been having far too much fun with the police tape. Basira made a mental note to try to get the person who put the tape up fired, because it was fucking annoying her. 

Daisy ripped the tape down with ease, and Basira followed her into the blessedly worm-free room, shutting the door behind her. She spent several seconds with her eyes closed, breathing in the fresh air (which was really only fresh in comparison to the entirely unbreathable rotting death smell of the main room), until Daisy scoffed softly from the other side of the room. 

Basira opened her eyes. “What?”

“They moved the body,” Daisy said, sounding immeasurably disappointed and staring mournfully at what appeared to be a chalk outline of a body, if one were to be rendered by a kindergartener. Upon closer inspection, Basira discovered it was actually white spray paint, since chalk on carpet was simply not a thing that was possible. Why they couldn’t have also outlined the million worm corpses and moved them too was beyond her, but that was the department for you. Never willing to put in the effort. She shook her head and patted Daisy on the shoulder comfortingly. 

“Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll get to see a dead body when we find and _accidentally_ kill in the confrontation whoever is responsible for this mess.”

Daisy nodded solemnly. “Very true.”

They poked around the room a bit more, but aside from a large bloodstain on the floor near the spray paint outline, the only interesting feature of the room was the enormous hole in the far wall, which appeared to have burst inward due to a bomb or maybe an overly enthusiastic Kool Aid Man. The hole led not to a hallway or some neighboring room like Basira might have expected, but into a narrow tunnel that ran parallel to the filing room. The light spilling from the room lit up only a small fraction of the tunnel, and both directions disappeared into darkness a few meters beyond the hole. This was unbelievably ominous, but really not even close to the strangest thing Basira had encountered in a basement. 

Daisy immediately voiced her intention to explore the tunnels, but Basira was not all that enthusiastic about spending her morning lost in some creepy, probably sentient, and definitely evil tunnels. “You really think they escaped in there?” They, in this case, being the four people who made up the staff of the Archives, who had been mysteriously missing since the events that had turned the place into a worm graveyard, and were therefore the prime suspects for those events and also the murder of the Elias guy.

“Worth looking,” Daisy said mildly, already pulling out her torch. Basira could see from the way her pupils were dilated that clearly Daisy had caught the tantalizing scent of the chase. Of course, Basira could smell it, too, flooding into her lungs and settling on her tongue sweet and sharp. But she wasn’t far gone enough (at least, not yet) for the urge to Hunt the suspects to override her detective instincts, which were insisting very strongly that those tunnels were Bad News. 

“I have a bad feeling about those tunnels,” she told Daisy. 

Daisy licked her lips, probably unconsciously, but tore her gaze away from the hole in the wall to meet Basira’s eyes. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” said Basira.

“Just a short peek? We’ll stop if there are any forks, so there’s no way we can get lost.” Daisy blinked at her innocently. God damn her beautiful eyelashes. One of these days, Basira being unable to resist those fluttering things was going to get both of them killed. 

“Ugh, fine. Don’t blame me if we get murdered.”

Daisy gave her a little smirk and bounded through the hole. Basira sighed (internally again, of course) and stepped in after her, grabbing her own torch and flicking it on. 

They actually made it ten whole seconds before Basira’s detective instincts were vindicated. 

Somewhere during the eleventh second, the walls of the tunnel began to groan and shift, and to their right, the stone cracked open with a deafening grinding noise to reveal a stout, graying man standing with his head buried in a book.

Daisy and Basira had their guns out and pointed at him in an instant. “Freeze,” Daisy snarled.

“Drop the book,” Basira added threateningly. Judging by the things that had just happened to the tunnel wall, it was almost definitely some kind of evil supernatural book, and she was not about to get crushed by rocks this morning either.

The man blinked, shook his head, looked up from the book, and stared at the two guns pointed at him with a mixture of confusion and outrage.

“Who the hell are you people, and what are you doing in my tunnels?”


	2. the incel

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey y'all! i'm thinking i can probably keep this to a weekly update schedule, tentatively on Sundays. (much slower than the previous fic in this series, i know, but unfortunately i am working full-time at the moment, so i have nowhere near the amount of free time i had while writing that fic :/) But we'll see how well I can keep to that (you might get some chapters sooner if i'm feeling writing during the week).
> 
> anyway, enjoy and let me know if ya liked it (also as a fun interactive activity, feel free to leave your favorite part of the jurgen leitner rant in the comments)!

“Who the hell are _you_?” Daisy growled, baring teeth that were perhaps slightly pointier than normal, but that was between Daisy and her dentist and none of Basira’s business. 

“Your tunnels?” Basira asked, simultaneously.

The man looked even more confused. “When you talk at the same time, it’s like, really hard to understand you. I hate it when people do that. Can’t you just take turns speaking like civilized men—uh, I mean, women? Great to see females being police officers, by the way; society has progressed so much since I’ve been underground.”

Oh god, the tunnel man was an incel. Although, upon further reflection, that sentence was not exactly a revelation. Daisy and Basira exchanged a long glance, during which Daisy raised an eyebrow ( _shoot him now?_ ) and Basira glared back ( _not until we get info out of him_ ) and Daisy rolled her eyes minutely ( _fine but I’m killing him after, also you have to ask him questions because I refuse to even speak to this worm_ ). They were very advanced at having glance conversations. 

“Right. Who are you and how long have you been in these tunnels?”

“Ah yes, of course,” the man said, puffing up his chest and inhaling so aggressively Basira expected him to start coughing. “It all started 25 years ago, when—”

“Cliffnotes version, please,” Basira interjected, suffusing her tone with as much boredom as possible and jerking her gun at him for emphasis.

The man wilted. “...Right. Er, my name is Jurgen Leitner, and I started hiding in these tunnels many years ago because I’m very unfairly unpopular among the evil eldritch being community.”

“Fascinating,” Basira said. “Do you ever come out of the tunnels? For example, to shoot Magnus Institute executive staff or transport approximately one million worms into the Institute’s basement?”

Leitner stared at her for a second in silence, possibly processing. “Er...sometimes? For food and such. But I can’t say I’ve ever done anything like those examples you listed.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty...sure…?” Leitner said, unconvincingly. “Look, the only reason I’m in the part of the tunnels close to the Institute right now is that I found these dead worms lying around and I wanted to see where they came from.”

“Well, there are approximately one million worms in the basement. So probably from there.” This man was kind of dumb, wasn’t he?

“Ah. Yes, you’re likely correct,” he said slowly. “So...if I may, why am I at gunpoint right now?” His eyes flicked between her and Daisy’s guns, and then back to the book still open in his hands. 

“You’re a murder suspect. You had access to the room where the victim was shot, and it seems like from what you’re saying, you were in these tunnels around the time the crime was committed.”

“Me? Murdering someone?” Leitner laughed heartily. “As if. Well, never directly,” he added under his breath, though it was loud enough that Basira could hear quite clearly. He was seeming a more promising suspect by the second.

“So where were you Tuesday afternoon, if not in the basement murdering the Head of the Institute?”

“The Head of the...damn, Elias Bouchard is dead?” Leitner said, sounding surprised. Oh right, that was the guy’s last name. “That I was definitely not expecting. Especially with his...skillset. Must have gotten sloppy in his, er, old age.” Leitner smirked like he was telling a private joke.

“He was like your age, but sure. Also, answer the question.” Basira jerked her gun at Leitner again threateningly. 

“I was in here, in the tunnels, the whole time. Actually, I was reading this Leitner the whole time, doing some tunnel remodeling,” he added, holding up the book. 

“You named a book after yourself? How fucking egotistical can you get?” Daisy said, breaking her silence probably out of pure incredulity. 

“Hey, I collected it!” Leitner said defensively. “It’s my book; I get to call it whatever I want, and I don’t need some woman police officer criticizing me. What do you even know about books?”

“Probably more than you,” Daisy snapped, flipping the safety of her gun off. 

“Ah, oh, no need for violence!” Leitner squeaked, like a coward, backing up towards the entrance to the tunnel his magic book had created. 

“Stop!” Basira barked, flicking her safety off as well. 

“Fine! Just don’t kill me! I did not murder Elias, but I have some information that could be helpful,” he said, smiling hopefully at the two of them.

“Yes? Spit it out,” Basira said, impatient. She was itching to kill this little incel man, and she could tell Daisy was too, mainly by the way her finger was practically vibrating on the trigger. 

“Okay, I don’t exactly know who killed him, but I am sure it was one of the staff in the Archives. Most likely the Head Archivist, because I heard gunshots from his office at an alarming frequency whenever I was in the tunnels next to it, so clearly he had a gun and experience using it.” Hm. That actually was pretty useful intel. 

“So please,” Leitner continued, “go arrest the Head Archivist. I am not a murderer. At least, not in this case,” he added under his breath, again loud enough for Basira to clearly hear. So definitely a murderer. Basira fingered the trigger of her gun contemplatively.

“Unfortunately, all four Archives employees disappeared after the murder, and none of them have been back to work since then,” she said reluctantly. She knew the names of three of the four of them from her short briefing (Jonathan Sims and two of his assistants, Martin Blackwood and Timothy Stoker; the electronic copy of the third assistant’s employment contract had apparently been “so corrupted it gave everyone who looked at it an instant migraine”), but not where they had gone or who they might contact. 

“That is far more suspicious behavior than anything I’ve done,” Leitner said smugly. “Why are you even interrogating m—” 

Daisy growled at him wordlessly, and his mouth snapped shut. Daisy’s growl was truly the most valuable tool in their combined arsenal, in that it got people to shut the fuck up very fast.

“Do you have any information on where we might be able to find them, then? Otherwise, we have a very suspicious suspect right here…” Basira said, gesturing at him with her gun to make sure he understood the implication. 

Leitner swallowed audibly. “Ah, well, I can’t say I know anything about their whereabouts, but I do know of someone who might. He really...gets around, you might say.”

“Go on.”

“His name is Michael. If you start opening doors and yelling his name, I’m certain he’ll find you.”

“Uh huh,” said Basira. “That sounds so realistic.” She turned to Daisy and raised her eyebrows ( _this guy is useless, let’s kill him?_ ).

“I swear! He’s an eldritch door creature! That’s like his whole thing!” Leitner cried, clearly clocking Basira’s glance. That sounded fake, but honestly Basira didn’t know enough about all the evil eldritch things out there to dispute it. 

“Fine,” she said, lowering her gun. “Thanks for the intel.” She tipped her head sideways at Daisy, who followed suit silently.

Leitner sagged visibly with relief and nodded at them. “I’ll just be on my way, then,” he said, inching towards the cracked-open wall of the tunnel again. 

“Oh, just one more question,” Basira said casually.

Leitner stopped inching and gave Basira a polite, Please For The Love Of God Let Me Out Of This Social Situation smile. “...Yes?”

“What was that about you not being a murder ‘in this case’?”

Leitner’s smile froze onto his face. “Well, you see, it’s a bit complicated, I never killed anyone _directly_ , see, they simply....perished in my presence? So I wouldn’t exactly call myself a—”

He was cut off by the loud _BANG_ of Daisy’s gun firing a bullet directly into his forehead. 

Basira narrowed her eyes at Daisy. Leitner’s body crumpled to the ground with a series of dull thumps. 

“What?” Daisy asked innocently. “He was annoying, and he obviously killed several people.”

“Fair enough. I was going to kill him in about 20 seconds anyway. I’m just jealous you beat me to it.” 

Daisy smirked, canines glinting in the torchlight. “Next time, Basira.”

Basira rolled her eyes, but it ended up being more affectionate than irritated. “Well. Guess we should go find a door and start yelling for this ‘Michael’ thing, then.”

Daisy nodded, and they holstered their guns and headed back towards the filing room, leaving Leitner’s bloody body behind.


	3. the hallway

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys!! sorry this is being posted a little late at night, but it's absolutely still Sunday where i am so it counts. i've never written this chapter's guest appearance character before, but it was def fun so i hope y'all enjoy -- let me know how i did!

Basira had not considered how irritating it would be to get completely ignored by an eldritch door creature even after several continuous minutes of tromping through worm corpses and opening and closing every door in the basement of the Magnus Institute. She slammed the one in front of her (the main door out of the Archives) closed with far more force than necessary, considered telling the still conspicuously absent “Michael” that he could eat her entire ass, rejected that idea in favor of preserving what little dignity she had left after these past few minutes, and turned around to go find Daisy and/or someone to shoot cathartically, whichever she ran into first. 

But before she could march more than a few steps away from the door, something creaked eerily behind her. Basira whipped back around, gun in hand, to see a garishly bright yellow door with paint peeling in strange spirals drifting open, and an unnaturally long-fingered hand creeping out from the widening gap between the door and its frame. Well, that definitely hadn’t been there before.

“I assume you’re Michael?” Basira said dryly at the door, in absolutely no mood for whatever bullshit intimidation tactic this was supposed to be. 

The creepy hand with its needle fingers pushed the door the rest of the way open, revealing a tall figure dressed in a barrage of neon as garish as the door’s paint job and framed by a halo of curly blonde hair that appeared to be squirming and spiraling with a mind of its own. The figure smiled widely at her. Much more widely than humanly possible. That was some interesting anatomy. Basira’s brain throbbed in protest just trying to look at it.

She leveled it with an unimpressed stare. “Is your name Michael, or not?”

Possibly-Michael looked almost disappointed for a second, like maybe it had been fishing for some sort of reaction with the creepy entrance and anatomically impossible smile, but quickly recovered and widened its grin further. “What’s in a name?” it said, cocking its head at her. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as—” 

“On god, if you finish that quote, I will shoot,” Basira interjected. Of fucking course the eldritch door creature quoted fucking Shakespeare. Birth was a curse and existence was a prison in which monsters got their kicks quoting Romeo and Juliet. 

The figure blinked at her. “Hm. Aggressive today, aren’t we?”

“Maybe if I hadn’t just opened and closed about seventeen doors and gotten worm corpses smeared all over my boots just to talk to someone who won’t even tell me if I’ve got the right eldritch entity, I’d be in a better mood.”

“...Fair enough,” it said. “You may call me Michael, if you must. And yes, the Flesh Hive is uniquely revolting. It was good of the Archivist and his assistants to dispatch it.”

“The Archivist—do you mean the Head Archivist of this place? Jonathan, uh, what’s his name, Sims?” Basira wasn’t exactly expecting a straight answer out of Michael, given how this conversation had been going, but it didn’t hurt to ask. She could always kill him if things went south. Free pass out of any unpleasant social situation, really. 

“I suppose I misspoke; he isn’t truly the Archivist here, is he? Not in this reality. Not with that boiling blood in his veins and in his heart and on his hands.” Michael giggled, the sound echoing and reverberating strangely. It made Basira’s head pound, and she tightened her grip on her gun, resisting the urge to massage her temples. “It’s all very complicated. Sometimes even I lose track,” it finished, spreading its arms wide in a lazy shrug. 

Basira decided to disregard whatever the hell it was trying to say about alternate realities or some shit and focus on the relevant nugget in that little speech: the whole “blood on his hands” part. “Are you saying that Sims killed the Head of the Institute? Did you see it happen? Do you know where he went?”

Michael put a too-long, too-sharp finger to its chin and tapped it contemplatively, in a parody of thought. “Perhaps, perhaps not. What difference does it make to you?”

“It’s my job to catch killers and bring them to justice,” Basira snapped, getting tired of this game. Michael clearly knew something and was just toying with her at this point. Maybe she needed some backup—where was Daisy, anyway? She risked a quick glance over her shoulder towards the back of the Archives and caught the flash of fluorescent lights off the barrel of a gun from somewhere in the shadows of the basement’s small kitchen. Basira felt a bit of tension drain out of her; Daisy had her back, as always. She looked back at Michael quickly, hoping she’d been too fast for him to notice.

No such luck. Michael’s dizzying eyes brightened. “I’m sure you two little Hunters know all about killers then, don’t you?” It beckoned towards the kitchen with those knife fingers. “Come on out; don’t be shy!”

Daisy stepped stiffly through the doorway into the main room of the Archives and picked her way over to Basira’s side, avoiding the worms yet again. Basira stared at Daisy’s pristine boots for a solid second with an enormous rush of jealousy before remembering she should probably keep an eye on the probably-evil door creature in front of her. 

“You two are just too cute! So wonderfully hypocritical! I love it!” Michael practically cooed, which. What the actual fuck. 

“Hey asshole—” Basira started, tapping into the rage supplied by a deep-seated hatred of that kind of baby-talk bullshit, but she was cut off by Daisy’s flat voice.

“If you kill more than one killer there’s less killers in the world.”

Michael stared at Daisy. Daisy, never one to back away from anything that could be in any way construed as a staring contest, or any battle of wills, for that matter, stared back.

Michael caved first. “You do make a compelling, if cliche, point. Maybe I will tell you what you wish to hear. But only after you answer my riddles three,” it said mysteriously. 

“Your fucking what,” said Basira.

Michael held her gaze for an uncomfortable few seconds before breaking into more head-pain-inducing laughter. “I’m just fucking with you, Hunter. You should lighten up. I don’t think all that frowning is good for your face.”

Basira frowned at him harder. 

Michael broke geometry again with its smile. “Just a thought. Regardless, I did talk to the not-Archivist and his assistant the other day. They wanted my help on a certain matter. I told them I don’t meddle in others’ affairs like that unless I feel like it, and in that case I was not feeling it. The vibes were entirely wrong. Which they did not appreciate, of course, and everything got a bit heated until I offered to direct them to another Michael that might be more amenable to their request. And then I gave them a little lift, and I haven’t seen them since.” 

That seemed like a blatant simplification of events, but Basira doubted they’d be able to get much more in the way of details even if they asked. 

“This other Michael,” Daisy said, “where is he?”

It rattled off an address that Basira hoped Daisy would be able to remember, because it went out her other ear as soon as she heard it. “If you wish, I can drop you off there. You would simply need to step into my hallways,” it continued, gesturing grandly to the half-open yellow door behind it. 

“Hard pass,” Basira said, and Daisy nodded vehemently in agreement. 

Michael pouted, its bottom lip drooping impossibly off of its face in a way that would probably be highly uncomfortable without the power of non-Euclidean geometry. “I was just trying to be hospitable. I wasn’t going to digest you. As I said, you Hunters are too adorable to eat!”

There was a lot to unpack there, but Basira would rather just throw away the entire suitcase and avoid hallways for the rest of her life. “You know what, why don’t you just get back inside your little hallways or your stomach or whatnot, and we’ll both go our separate ways? No killing or digesting required for either party?” Basira was absolutely not going soft; she just wasn’t entirely sure their bullets would work very well on a thing like Michael. 

“You’re quite rude, but I will let it slide just this once. Good luck with your Hunt! I’m sure it will be very funny when you catch up to them.” Michael gave her and Daisy a little mocking bow and disappeared back through the yellow door, his curly hair bouncing energetically behind him. The door closed with a soft click, and between one blink and the next, it was gone like it’d never been there in the first place. 

Basira sighed and lowered her gun, turned to Daisy. 

“At least it was interesting,” Daisy said, shrugging and holstering her own gun. “Way less annoying than Leitner.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I hope you remembered that address, though. The faster we get there, the better chance of catching up with Sims and whichever assistant he’s been running around with.”

“I remember.” Daisy clapped a hand on Basira’s shoulder. “Finally, a proper hunt. It’s been too damn long.” She stepped forward and opened the remaining door, the one out of the Archives. “Come on, Basira. Oh, but you’d better scrub those worm corpses off your boots before you get in my car. I just got the interior cleaned.”

Basira reached out to smack her, but Daisy darted out the door before Basira could reach her. What an asshole. She pressed her lips together to suppress the dopey smile that threatened to break across her face, and stomped after Daisy out of the Archives.


	4. the manlet

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey, nothing much to report, but I hope you guys enjoy the chapter! My comment challenge for this week is: which Michael is the superior Michael? Or you can just let me know what part of the chapter ya liked best ;)

The other Michael’s flat looked relatively normal from the outside, at least. The front door was not bright yellow, for one, but an understated blue-gray that reminded Basira of a stormy sky. She hung back, hand resting lightly on her gun just in case this did turn out to be another crazy eldritch monster (she was going to assume on principle that anyone yellow door Michael sent them to was a supernatural menace, regardless of door color), while Daisy knocked firmly a few times. 

There was silence from the flat for several seconds, but then Basira could pick out footsteps approaching the door in a distinctly angry manner. (The reason for her skill in identifying the negative emotions of footsteps was a secret she was taking to the grave, thanks, and nothing to do with repeated theft of Daisy’s greek yogurt from the fridge in the station break room.) The door swung open, and a very short man with a branching scar crawling up his neck took one look at them before saying, in a scathing tone of voice similar to the one Basira usually reserved for people who had the audacity to try to speak to her at mandatory office holiday parties, “Jesus fuck, how many of you people do I have to deal with this week?”

“What do you mean, ‘you people?’” Basira asked, whipping out the mandatory office holiday party tone in order to show this manlet that she was not about to take shit like that from anyone, let alone someone who only came up to her chin. 

The man, presumably other Michael, sighed aggressively and leaned against the doorframe in a way he maybe thought made him look cool and edgy but really just made him look shorter. “Avatars? If you’re with those other two, you can tell them no amount of intimidation by Hunters is going to make me help them. That shit is _not_ my problem. I just mind my business, and if I occasionally throw someone off the Eiffel Tower so Simon will give me my monthly allowance, well, that’s my business.”

“Did you just admit to murder in front of two cops?” Daisy asked him, cocking her head in an unmistakably predatory way. 

“That’s a rather rude accusation,” other Michael said, frowning. He took several slow steps towards them. “And I was trying so hard to be polite.”

“No you fucking weren’t?” said Basira, incredulous.

“Okay, you know what, that’s fair, I wasn’t actually trying that hard.”

As soon as other Michael finished his sentence, wind began to whistle past Basira’s ears, accelerating rapidly. She felt her stomach swoop with vertigo and stumbled, but before she lost her balance completely both the wind and the vertigo vanished as suddenly as they’d appeared. When she looked back up to see what had stopped other Michael from tossing her into the sky, or whatever the hell that had been an attempt at doing, she was met with the comforting sight of Daisy with her gun pressed firmly to the center of his forehead. 

“Don’t try me,” Daisy said coolly, and then added, “bitch,” probably for good measure. Basira blamed the strange sensation in her stomach (someone more childish might have called them butterflies, but she was a grown ass adult) on lingering vertigo.

“So maybe I can be intimidated,” other Michael said slowly, eyes somewhat wide and pointed up at the gun. “Right, I promise I won’t throw you into the Vast if you don’t shoot me? I can see you have a, um, _very_ quick draw, so I’m sure you’d have no problem shooting me if I renege on that agreement.”

Daisy glanced over her shoulder at Basira, keeping one eye on him and the gun firmly planted against his skull, and raised an eyebrow ( _kill him?_ ). Basira frowned and tilted her head minutely ( _could have valuable info, worth the risk_ ). Daisy’s eyes narrowed ( _your funeral_ ), but she slowly lowered the gun. 

Other Michael smiled politely at her and then at Basira (it looked a bit like a grimace but Basira could hardly judge, having been informed more than once that her smile in photos made her “look like she wanted to die”). “Great, very generous of you, thanks. Now, I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot a...bit. I’m Mike Crew, nice to meet you.”

“Basira,” Basira said shortly, “and this is Daisy. Like she said before, we’re police. Investigating a murder at the Magnus Institute. The other people you talked to this week are suspects. We think one is Jonathan Sims, but we’re not sure about the other. Got any information on that? What they’re doing or where they might have gone?”

Crew (who did not look at _all_ like a “Mike”) seemed to contemplate this for a second. “Yes, one of them was named Jonathan. I think the other was Matthew or Martin or something.” Aha, so the assistant Sims was palling around with was Martin Blackwood, then. That was at least somewhat helpful. “I’m not sure how much those two want this spread around,” Crew continued, “but they asked for my help stopping the apocalypse. I think it’s bullshit. That avatar is nowhere near powerful enough to pull off a Ritual. Even if it does happen, they’d be able to stop it themselves easily, so why do I have to be involved? Can’t I just push people off buildings in peace?” He sighed, sounding deeply aggravated about having his murder time interrupted. Boo fucking hoo. Basira was beginning to think it would be fine to shoot him just a little bit. 

“I wouldn’t know for sure where they are right now, but I can tell you I sent them off to another avatar. I wouldn’t have done anything for them, but that Martin has the most powerful puppy eyes... Anyway, the avatar’s name is Jude Perry.” He proceeded to tell them about a cafe she apparently frequented and said he’d directed Sims and his assistant to, since he didn’t actually know where this Jude Perry woman lived. 

“So, satisfied? I think I held up my end of the bargain,” Crew said, glancing rather obviously at the gun still sitting snug in Daisy’s hand where it dangled at her side. 

He had, but there was the small matter of him admitting twice to pushing people off tall things. Basira schooled her expression into something neutral, nodding minutely at Daisy when she looked back again. “Of course, we appreciate it. Now about those buildings,” she said, and Daisy whipped her gun back up in an instant, but before she could shoot, both of them were hit with a massive wave of vertigo, strong enough to make Basira lose her balance and drop to the ground. 

When the world stopped spinning around her, Basira pushed herself up carefully. In front of her, Daisy was already standing, anger clear in the hard lines of her shoulders. Of course, Crew was gone. Damn. Basira made for his front door, which was now closed, but Daisy put out an arm to stop her and growled, “It’s locked. And he’s not in there anyway.” 

Fuck. Not ideal. But hey. They had a name and a cafe. Sims and Blackwood were the bigger picture here, not some little man who was weirdly good at making people dizzy. They knew where he lived; they could always track him down later, once those two were dealt with. 

Basira shared those thoughts with Daisy and was rewarded with a grunt. So maybe she was taking it a bit harder than Basira had. 

“Come on, Daisy. We’re getting closer. You must feel it, too.” Basira tapped the gun Daisy was still gripping angrily. “Probably wouldn’t have been great to have unsilenced shots in the middle of a residential neighborhood in broad daylight anyway, now that I think about it.” 

“Hm,” said Daisy, but she tucked the gun back into its holster and turned to head for the car, Basira following. Before she unlocked it, though, she looked carefully at Basira. “You okay?” Her voice was soft, and had lost the gruff undertone of a few moments ago.

Basira almost flushed at the intensity of the concern in Daisy’s eyes. “Yes, fine. Thanks though. You know, it wasn’t your fault he got away. He was surprisingly powerful.”

Daisy’s lips formed a slanted half-smile. “Yeah. Honestly underestimated him because he was so fucking short. Probably pushing people off buildings is a way to make him feel tall.”

Basira snorted and caught the car keys when Daisy tossed them over. Her turn to drive, plus they had a promising lead. Despite the loss of the manlet, this day was definitely looking up.


	5. the b****

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay guys, i am so, so sorry for totally dropping the ball on this fic. in my defense, s2 of the umbrella academy dropped like a week and a half ago and i've been on tua lockdown since then, plus moving in and out of two different places. obviously i'm still interested in tma, and i'm still planning to finish this fic eventually, but i'm probably not going to be able to stick to weekly updates (especially with school starting up again in less than a week), so i don't want to give y'all false hope about that :')
> 
> please enjoy this lil chapter, and sorry again for the lapse in updates! if ya liked anything in particular, lmk :)

Jude Perry was a bitch.

Somehow, Basira hadn’t been expecting that, despite the fact that every avatar they’d run into so far had been an utter asshole in one way or another. Maybe it was the deep respect and appreciation she had for other women that made her believe beyond all logic that Perry would actually be civil. Maybe she’d just wanted her day to keep going well for more than 30 goddamn minutes, an evidently impossible feat. 

Regardless, Perry was awful, and had been since she and Daisy had walked into the cafe and marched up to where the woman they’d assumed was her was sitting (she was literally smoking, and not in the killing-your-lungs sense, which kind of gave it away).

“The fuck do you two want?” said Perry, glaring at them from behind a lidless paper cup of coffee that was somehow at a full rolling boil. Her face was somewhat obscured by the absolutely enormous cloud of steam rising from the coffee, but even then, she was clearly already irritated. 

“Information,” Basira said shortly, throwing an arm up casually to keep Daisy from lunging at Perry. The antagonistic lesbian energy in the cafe was absolutely off the charts, tension almost palpable, so Basira had to take some basic precautions. Like physically restraining her partner so Daisy didn’t murder some smoking lady in the middle of the day in the middle of a cafe.

Perry’s gaze sharpened (Basira thought. Again, absurd amounts of steam obscuring her face). “What’s in it for me?” 

Daisy, who had restrained herself from jumping over or under or around Basira’s arm at Perry, bared her impressively sharp teeth and said sweetly, “We let you walk out of here.”

Perry bared her teeth back in a sloppy imitation (this was easy to see as all the coffee had boiled itself into vapor and the paper cup was now only smoking gently). “You’re funny.” She gestured at the seat opposite her and nodded at Daisy to sit. “Okay, I’ll bite. What kind of information?”

Daisy slipped into the seat gracefully, sharp and poised as a predator at the edge of her chair. Basira quickly stole a chair from a neighboring table, ignoring the customer who protested that they were saving it for someone, and dragged it over to sit beside her. 

“Asshole,” muttered the customer. Basira flipped them off without looking and focused on Perry’s poker face. She was in an intense staring contest with Daisy, which had evidently started in the two seconds it had taken Basira to get another goddamn chair. 

“We heard you might’ve talked to a man named Jonathan Sims and his assistant, Martin Blackwood, from the Magnus Insti—” Basira began, but Perry cut in before she could finish the sentence.

“Oh god, you’re with _those_ idiots?”

“They’re wanted for murder. We’re attempting to capture them. Kill them. You know, if need be,” said Daisy, still attempting intense eye contact with Perry.

Perry smirked and leaned back in her chair, folding her arms behind her head in an exaggeratedly casual motion. “Ah, well, if _that’s_ the case, then I guess I do have some information for you.” 

When she didn’t volunteer anything for several seconds, Basira raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“Those tools were asking me for help with avatar shit. Like I’d work with a Slaughter bitch or a Spider freak. The Slaughter is honestly just a knock-off of my god, you know? All that violence, but it’s missing the _spark_. Fuckin’ lame. And I’m pretty sure that Blackwood guy is committing treason or something, like, I’m not going to involve myself in that petty shit. Anyway, I sent ‘em over to Nikola. Maybe she’ll help, or better yet, maybe she’ll off them for me and save me the effort. Eh, don’t really care either way.”

Fucking shit, Sims and Blackwood were avatars, too? And Slaughter and Web to boot? That...might complicate things a bit. She and Daisy were strong Hunters, yes, but Slaughter avatars were notoriously tricky to off, especially in violent confrontations where they could easily channel their Entity to gain the upper hand. And the Web...if Blackwood knew Basira and Daisy were after him, if he had preparation, time to spin a little web, things could get ugly. 

Also, who the hell was Nikola?

“Nikola?” Basira prompted. 

“Oh, old friend. Sort of. Great in small doses; absolutely obnoxious otherwise. She’s one of the Stranger’s lot, likes to hang out in this old wax museum in Great Yarmouth. I’m sure she’d love to meet you,” Perry said, obviously lying. But honestly, Stranger avatars weren’t particularly dangerous, other than sometimes being hard to kill with bullets, and they had a nice cache of grenades stashed in Daisy’s car, so they’d be fine. 

Basira exchanged a long-ish glance with Daisy ( _she’s lying; Nikola’s going to want to skin us_ ), and Daisy rolled her eyes ( _yeah, duh, got that_ ). Well, at least they were on the same page. They both looked back at Perry. 

“Thanks, appreciate it,” Basira said mildly, trying to inject actual appreciation into her tone so Perry wouldn’t up and decide a subpar expression of gratitude was grounds for murder (you never really knew with Desolation types). 

“Happy to help get those bitches kille—I mean, help the cause,” Perry said, with a leer that might have been generously called a smile. 

Basira smiled back tightly. “Much obliged.” She tapped Daisy’s arm, and they rose in unison. 

Daisy nodded at Perry, and Perry gave a sarcastic salute in silent response, before picking up her coffee cup and seeming somewhat disappointed by the lack of any liquid in it.

Back at the car, Daisy stole the keys back from Basira, while Basira Google Mapped wax museums in Great Yarmouth (thankfully there was only one). 

“We still have those grenades, right?” she said while Daisy turned the key in the ignition.

Daisy quirked her lips at Basira. “Of course, Basira. What, you think I’m unprepared for Strangers?”

Basira smiled back almost unconsciously, like her lips were keyed in to Daisy’s somehow. “Just making sure.”

Okay, Google said barely three hours. The sun was sinking inexorably towards the horizon, but they’d narrowed Sims’ and Blackwood’s lead by days in barely half of one. Basira could _feel_ them getting closer. 

Yes, their apparent avatarhood was something to worry about, but what were long drives for if not planning detailed assassination plots based on the eldritch entity your quarry was associated with? Much more exciting than I Spy, at least.


End file.
